Ellis Island (2 page)

Chapter Two

In September, John and I started back at school and I was afraid I was going to lose him.

There were fifty or so children with ages ranging from six to thirteen, and we were crammed into two small rooms with two teachers. We sat in lines of four at long, wooden desks. Our uniforms divided us. Along with about one-third of the girls in our school, I wore a long navy wool shift—ordered up from Galway by Moran’s, the outfitters in Kilmoy—and a long white cotton pinafore, laundered and starched twice weekly by my mother. I had boots that I wore every day and, when they wore out or pinched too hard, my parents replaced them. Other girls wore slips of dresses, torn cardigans and no shoes. Their lack of status was further announced by the dirt on their faces and under their nails, and by their matted, untidy hair. Although we mixed in the yard during break, in the classroom the teachers saw to it that the clean girls sat together near the fire, while the dirtier ones sat nearer the door, to minimize the stench of poverty. The boys seemed more similar to one another, as they all wore shorts and even those who could afford shoes chose not to wear them, apart from on the coldest days. As the boys got older, their legs crammed awkwardly flesh to flesh under the shallow desks, naked to the thigh in outgrown shorts, scabby bloodstained knees quivering with the cold, making the metal legs of the desks rattle against the stone floor until the teacher would come over and bring their fist down on a desktop. Some of us lived near the school—John and I included—but many had to walk up to five miles every morning to get there, and five miles home again.

When we got back from our summer holiday that year, many of the boys were missing. Their fathers had noticed strength in their sons during the summer and put them to work farming full time. That was what John would have liked, I feared. He never listened to the teacher
Mrs. Grealy, but was always looking out the window—not dreaming, like some of us, but studying the apple tree outside the school gates, as its colors changed with the season.

“There’s nothing happening out there, John,” I said one day as we left to make our way home. “It’s just a tree.”

He smiled. “There’s more happened in that tree today, Ellie, than will happen in this classroom in a lifetime.”

I raised my eyes to heaven, imitating Maidy, and he laughed. I loved making John laugh. When he laughed, I felt like he belonged to me.

As we passed the gate, he reached up casually into the tree and picked off an apple, handing it to me and saying, “See?” As if he had grown it himself for my benefit, just by looking out during lessons.

It was tiny and hard and as bitter as Satan’s tears. “Yuk!” I said, spitting and making him laugh again. “You’re a stupid eejit,” I said, and he chased me home.

When winter came the school became bitterly cold. We all moved into the same classroom for warmth, and each child was asked to bring in a piece of fuel with them to put in the small, open fireplace. However, many of the children were from families too poor to keep their own fires burning, or were too stunted and weak to carry even a sod of turf five miles or more. By lunchtime we could barely see the pages we were writing on beneath the fog of our own breath, or hear the teachers above the clatter of chattering teeth. John complained to Paud Hogan about this one afternoon. “It’s school business,” Paud said, but John insisted, “There’s enough turf in the county, Pa, to warm a small school, surely.” We were sitting on the edge of his fireplace, roasting ourselves, and Maidy had to poke us out of the way to get to her cooking. John pushed and pushed until Paud agreed. The two of them loaded the cart with their own bail of turf, then called on every farmer in the area for contributions until they had the cart piled with enough fuel to keep the school cozy all through the winter.

Everyone loved John, and I felt honored that he was my friend. Even though ten-year-old boys didn’t like to be seen playing with eight-year-old girls, John was happy to walk me home from school, openly waiting at the gates for me if I dawdled. But at break time, John played with boys his age and I was stuck standing with Kathleen Condon, who had thick glasses and was as disliked by me as much as by the other girls. I didn’t know why I got stuck with her. I wasn’t ugly or annoying like Kathleen—in fact, I was smaller and prettier than many of the popular girls. I decided that was probably why the others hated me: they were jealous of my looks, and the fact that my family was better off than theirs. It hurt, not being invited to play with the others, but I pretended not to mind. In any case, I didn’t like the way they carried on, bragging about their devotion to the Blessed Virgin and gossiping about the neighbors like old women. My mother didn’t gossip, so I never had any news. And I had always been taught that it was unseemly to talk about one’s private prayers and devotions. I had voiced this opinion once and imagined that was another reason for their rejection of me.

Nobody liked Kathleen because her glasses made her eyeballs swim around her face like big, frightening fish, but she was just the same as them—always trying to get in with the others—talking nonstop about this one and that one, telling me that if the communion wafer touched your teeth, you’d be sucked down into the ground by Satan when you were sleeping. One day, when I refused to act out a tableau where she was the Blessed Virgin and I was a Sinning Advocate prostrate at her feet, she finally told me the real reason nobody liked me. “Your grandpa killed baby children when their mas came looking for food and he wouldn’t give them any, and your father loves the bastard British.”

I didn’t cry. I just told her she looked a fright—which she knew anyway—and pretended she hadn’t said anything, but my stomach was turned inside out on itself all afternoon.

I was quiet on the way home and John asked if there was something wrong. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said.

“Kathleen Condon was awful to me because I wouldn’t play her stupid game.” I didn’t tell him what she had said. I didn’t want him despising me as well because of my family. “I hate her and I’m never going to play with her again.”

John stopped to break off a long stalk of blackberries, pulling his sleeves over his hands and freeing the bramble from the mangled hysteria of the hedgerow with a ferocious twist. He served me the ripe berries as we walked on, passing them to me in soppy handfuls, his stained palm a platter. “Don’t do that, Ellie,” he said. “Poor Kathleen has nobody, only you.”

My mother’s aunt was still ailing in the spring. By now, I had a comfortable routine: John always walked me home after school, but, three days out of the five, I would carry on with him to the Hogans’ and spend the afternoon there. They would feed me, then allow me to follow John around the farm as he did his chores. I was scant help to him. Mesmerized the first, second, third time I saw him milk a cow, after that it was my mission to distract him. I’d call and challenge him from some hiding place, clamber up a tree and squeal for his help; one time, I lay down under his favorite cow and urged him to squirt the milk directly into my open mouth. He failed and I got soaked in milk and muck. It wasn’t hard for me to untether John from his duties. It seemed that all that mattered was our happiness. I discovered freedom and joy, and I grabbed it with both my small hands and didn’t let it go until I got back to my parents’ house.

For all the freedom she gave us, Maidy was a tidy woman and hated to send me home to my mother with muck on my uniform.

“Pssht, child. Your mother will think I have no respect for her if I send you home in that state!”

Tired of nagging and scrubbing stains off my skirt, one day she put me into a pair of John’s working trousers—the ones he changed into after school to keep his shorts clean and his legs protected from all the cow muck and dirt on the farm. They looked comical on me, but Maidy insisted on rolling them up to my knees and leaving on only my woollen undershirt, which she then covered with one of her aprons, binding me up in its voluminous, flowery print until I looked like a package.

I ran and ran that afternoon. With my legs protected, I fled down a hill of nettles and climbed up the spindly silver birch tree by the road before John reached me, panting comically as if he couldn’t keep up. He was afraid of that tree because the branches were too small to hold him. I was light enough that I knew they would hold my weight. I had always wanted to climb that tree, but John had never let me up it on my own, in case I fell.

“Come down, Ellie—the branch will break and you’ll fall.”

“You’re just jealous because I can see the world from here and you’re stuck there on the ground.”

“It’s dangerous, Ellie—I mean it, come down.”

I was a little anxious, because I realized John knew better than me. Yet at the same time I felt in charge of the world, protected by my distance from the ground. I could say and do anything I pleased; nobody could reach me. In any case, his fear made me more defiant. “Won’t never come down, John Hogan—won’t never, ever . . . You’ll have to come up and get me!” I felt dizzy from the running and my high position.

Miss Kennedy, the priest’s housekeeper, came down the road on her bicycle. She was quite pretty and younger than my mother, but I didn’t like her. She sat near the front in Mass and acted very holy. But once, when I was bored, I studied her face after communion and saw her watch every person coming back up the aisle as if she were measuring them for a coffin. She was creepy and I was a little scared of her. But from my vantage point in the sky, she looked like a small beetle.

“Hey—Miss Kennedy!” I shouted.

She pretended she didn’t hear me, so I shouted again.

“Hey—Kennedy!”

John looked up at me, daggers. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t care. “Good afternoon, Miss Kennedy,” he said like an altar boy, touching a nonexistent cap as she passed the tree. Then: “You’ve done it now—come down from that tree at once, Ellie Flaherty, or I’ll whip you!”

I was laughing so hard he had to come up and get me in the end. The tree bent, but it stayed with us and didn’t break.

Chapter Three

When John dropped me home that evening, my father opened the door to us and I knew there was something wrong. He gave John a cursory greeting and closed the door in his face.

My father was a vague figure in my life. I knew the map of my mother’s dour face, the sour smell of her breath in the mornings, her apologetic way of moving about the house, the cold, dry touch of her skin as I accidentally brushed against her in the night. But I was not so familiar with my father. He slept in our house, but I viewed him as everybody else did—an important man to be feared. As known, and yet as strange, to me as our local priest.

He walked into the dining room and I followed him. The good mahogany table was set for tea, yet there was the smell of polish in the air. The teapot and milk jug looked awkward with each other; this was not our usual time to eat. My father was never here at this time. Everything was wrong. Through the kitchen door I could see my mother keeping herself busy laying out bread and ham, which we would not eat. My mother’s face was set, too determined on her duties.

“Were you wearing a pair of . . .” My father’s long face looked particularly stern, his jaw set, the words sputtering out of him as if each was a poison pellet and he was unable to spit out the final one. “Were you wearing a pair of . . .”

I didn’t finish the sentence for him. I knew enough not to do that. And I was puzzled.

“What were you wearing this afternoon?”

I felt relieved. Perhaps I wasn’t in trouble after all. “Maidy put me in a pair of John’s trousers so I wouldn’t dirty my uniform.” He closed his eyes and his features contorted as if he were in pain. It was as much emotion as I had ever seen on my father’s face. My stomach tumbled although I wasn’t sure why. I said, “
Sir.
”

Father went out into the hallway and opened the tall cupboard where he kept his umbrella, and took out a wooden cane. It had been there all along, waiting for its day. Waiting for me to sin. “Do you understand why I have to punish you?”

“Yes,” I lied. I had never been punished before; I had always been a good girl and done as I was told. That counted for nothing now, though. I had given cheek to Miss Kennedy and I had to be punished. Perhaps my real crime had been climbing trees, and laughing and feeling free and full of excitement and laughter. Perhaps it was a sin to feel as happy as I did with John, and if that was the case I didn’t care. If I was a sinner, then so was John—and Maidy, and even Paud. If Satan sucked me down into the bowels of hell, then I would have them with me and it wouldn’t be so bad.

I took six strokes on each hand. Each one stung more than the last. I flinched, but I didn’t cry out. Each time the cane struck, it burned my skin and an ember of defiance glowed inside me.
I will do as I please.
I kept saying it to myself over and over again.
I will do as I please.

My father then said ten decades of the rosary with me. Not rushing, as he usually did, but lingering on each word, relishing each as a jewel.
“Hail Holy Queen . . . We beseech Thee . . . Oh clement, Oh loving, Oh sweet Virgin Mary . . .”
Infusing the words with adoration, and with another emotion that I recognized in my father only when he was praying—love. And all the time I was thinking how stupid it was that all these words were tumbling out of him and yet he had been unable to say the word “trousers” earlier.

My parents stayed up late that night, talking urgently. I knew they were discussing me. They rarely talked, and it was strangely comforting falling asleep to the sound of their muffled voices coming up through the floorboards.

I lay on my side of the bed and thought of what John would say when I told him I had been caned for wearing his trousers. He would be sure to say something good that would make the bad feelings go away.

The following day my mother was waiting for me outside the school. I had thought that my punishment the night before had been the end of it.

“That’s the end of it now.” My father had actually said that. “We won’t talk of this again.”

Yet there she was, all buttoned up like she was going to Mass; gloves, hat, boots and bag, all tightly packaged; her long skirt raised precisely so that it neither touched the ground nor revealed her ankles. John and I were the first out, as usual.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Flaherty,” John said, as we reached the road. She looked through him as if he wasn’t there and suddenly I realized why everyone hated my mother. In that moment, I hated her too.

She walked quickly and silently, all the time gripping my still-burning hand in her bony fingers, pulling me. The journey that seemed so short with John took forever. The magical hedgerows, usually teaming with life, were thick and dead. My mother’s silence threw a blanket over nature.

When we got home, my father had left lessons for me to do, mathematics and catechism. If I finished my study before tea, he had said I was to help my mother with her chores. My mother never let me help with the chores. She liked doing everything herself. She had paused over the words, “Your father said you are to . . . to help me in the house,” letting me know that it was his idea and not hers. I made sure I lingered over my study, so as not to be hanging around her apron.

The dining room where I sat was like a tomb. There was no air. We had heavy mahogany furniture and the walls were padded with shelves, packed with my father’s religious tomes. The chubby, cross face of Pope Pius X judged us from the mantelpiece over the tiled fireplace, and when the kitchen door was open and the light came in, you could see the image of Christ’s Sacred Heart on the opposite wall reflected in the pope’s face—scarlet and bleeding and very, very sad. Maidy had a portrait of the Sacred Heart on her mantelpiece, but there was always a box of tea in front of it, and sometimes a jar with flowers covered the bloody heart, so Christ didn’t seem as gory or unhappy as he appeared in our house.

My father came straight home from work that evening and we ate together. Boiled bacon with cabbage and potatoes. We had linen napkins and a starched cloth and silver cutlery. When my father was not with us we ate in the kitchen, but my father expected better.

“He is used to fine things,” my mother once explained to me. “He was nearly a priest.” She always made a fuss when my father ate with us. Polished the knives, and moved the salt and pepper this way and that. It was as if she was afraid of him. Not in a bad way, only in the way you’d be afraid of a priest—or God.

“This is very nice, dear,” he said to my mother. She moved her lips slightly to indicate a smile. “How did you get on with your lessons, Eileen?” He always called me by my birth name.

“Very good, Sir.”

He closed his eyes, smiled and when he opened them again said, “You know you can call me ‘Father,’ Eileen.”

I wanted to tell him that he could call me Ellie—except that I didn’t want him to. I did not want to be there with either of them. I wanted to be with John, in his house, eating bacon served up in wet, salty hunks, washed down with fresh milk drunk straight from the jug. Not these dry slices that got caught in my throat, and lukewarm water from glasses with spindly stems.

That night I lay in bed next to my mother and imagined that John was going to come and rescue me. I waited until my mother fell asleep, then I sat up and stared at the window, willing him to come climbing through it to carry me off to live in his house with Maidy and Paud. I was sure they would have me. I didn’t know that I could put the word “love” on it because they weren’t my real family, but they weren’t John’s immediate family either and they loved him. My parents didn’t love me, I was sure of that, and perhaps if I could just get to the Hogans’ myself, Maidy might persuade them to let me stay. I sat and waited until my eyes began to close. I fell to sleep imagining my body was suspended on the branches of my silver birch. Like a princess on a bed of leaves, waiting to be rescued.